Comparative study on muscle tenderness evaluating methods

The muscle tenderness is an important index that is often used to evaluate the quality of the muscle by tasting and eating. But how shall we evaluate the muscle tenderness with reason and equity? Tests were done using the intelligent muscle tenderness meter, which was previously developed by us. It is found that test results depend not only on the precision and reliability of the instrument, but also on some other factors, e.g., assessment methods, the pretreatment, standardized sampling methods, and the assessment index for the muscle tenderness, etc. This paper gave a comprehensive analysis of effects of these factors. The suggestions were proposed on the index of muscle tenderness assessment, which provides the basis for standardizing muscle tenderness testing procedure and setting down the muscle tenderness-testing standard before testing muscle tenderness. We suggest the handling procedure of muscle should be adopted to unify the standard. The sampling of muscle must be standard by using the same kind of tool. When testing, we should adopt high accuracy, dependable test instrument. And the index of tenderness is expressed with shearing strength.